Hope opens in US theaters on Monday 7 September in premium formats, with a wide release two days later, and the wait has been a long one. The setup is deceptively simple: a police chief and his rookie deputy in a remote South Korean village are sent to investigate a creature that starts picking off the locals, and what they uncover turns into something far bigger than either of them expected.
It is director Na Hong-jin's first film since The Wailing in 2016, and a decade away has done nothing to shrink his ambitions. Hope blends science fiction, mystery and action into one sprawling story, and it became the most expensive movie ever produced in South Korea, a measure of how far the production pushed to pull it off.
The village sits near the DMZ, isolated enough that outside help is never close and suspicion spreads as fast as the danger itself. Hwang Jung-min plays the police chief trying to hold the town together, Hoyeon plays the officer working the case alongside him, and Zo In-sung rounds out the local cast.
An international ensemble joins them, led by Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander, giving Hope a scale and a cast list that reach well beyond Korean cinema's usual borders.
Hope premiered in Competition at Cannes this year and drew one of the festival's longest standing ovations, a strong response for a film this odd and ambitious to pull off. The action filmmaking is the draw and the visual effects are where it wobbles, and a 68 on Metacritic fits a film that splits opinion rather than winning everyone over outright.
For a director who spent ten years away, Hope plays like a statement: bigger, stranger and more expensive than anything South Korean genre film has attempted before. Fourteen days out, it is shaping up to be one of the most unusual wide releases of the year.
